(snip)
As for Arachne running with any of those hardware add ons, I don't see
any problem. I never had one. Where the problem lies, and did for me,
was in getting DOS recognized and used by the NIC. These new NICs are
"smart" and like to think on their own ... but to get them thinking you
may have to "install" and thankfully 3Com *DOES* provide DOS
installation on their cards. :> However, if you are running anything
other than MS-DOS you might have problems. And my 3Com NIC required
that I use a version of HIMEM.SYS from DOS 6.2 or higher. I had it, and
am using setver to run that version in my primarily DOS5 setup. Mind
you, SETVER warns you not to use any versions of program newer than
itself, but I've never had any problems.
l.d.
====
(end of quote)
You mean those NICs work with MS-DOS but not DR-DOS? DR-DOS uses EMM386.EXE
without HIMEM.SYS on 386 and better.
Does the DOS setup write to the hard drive? As MS-Windows and other OSes
advance, more computer users are likely to have no DOS-readable FAT16 partition.
With MS-Windows, the entire hard disk may be in one FAT32 or NTFS partition, and
there may be no real DOS at all in Win NT, 2000 or XP. Linux/Unix servers also
might have no DOS at all, and then there are the non-i386 CPUs such as PowerPC,
Alpha, Ultra Sparc and others.
I still have diskettes to boot MS-DOS 5 and 6.22 but am not sure if this DOS
could read my FAT16 partitions, where I run DR-DOS and keep data.
Maybe they should provide a self-booting diskette or image that can be written
for a bootable DOS diskette? IBM did that in 1999 with a Y2K BIOS compliance
testing program, free for download, where the diskette image included a stripped
DOS just for the purpose of running the Y2K compliance test.
